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I think "inexcusable" is very strong. Maybe "lazy" is the best word, but moving from Android's classic "grant permissions on install" to "prompt for permission

by rtpg 10y ago

I think "inexcusable" is very strong. Maybe "lazy" is the best word, but moving from Android's classic "grant permissions on install" to "prompt for permission" is a major change that they spent a long time working on (I think Android 4 already had a lot of the backend for this?). It's not like it was secretly granting permissions to apps, and you could always choose to not install something that took too many permissions. You could say they made the wrong choice, but we're a long way from "this binary can do everything on your files" model of Unices/Windows

qzervaas 10y ago
Inexcusable may be strong - but I wish I could find the thread I was referring to. Perhaps they were working on it for a long time, but they were actively defending their stance for years after many people were requesting this, and after many incidents of Play Store apps intentionally doing more than expected (uploading contact lists, tracking location, etc...). As someone who has developed and published Android apps, it was super frustrating to spend half your app description justifying each and every permission used, and still getting negative reviews simply because you had to request some scary looking permission for the most mundane feature addition.